Sitting judges face impeachment threats for rulings a president dislikes, the Senate can't agree on how to fill dozens of vacant benches, and public confidence in the Supreme Court is near a record low — is the third branch still functioning as an independent check?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Impeaching judges over rulings, not misconduct, turns impeachment into a weapon against judicial independence. Six House impeachment resolutions were introduced against federal judges in 2025 alone — all in direct response to rulings against the administration, not to any allegation of a crime, bribery, or misconduct, the traditional basis for judicial impeachment. Chief Justice Roberts took the rare step of publicly rebuking the practice, and threats against judges' physical safety followed the same rhetoric.
These resolutions have zero realistic path to conviction, which is itself evidence the constitutional guardrail is holding. Only 15 federal judges have been impeached by the House in American history, and only eight of those were ever removed — nearly all for bribery, perjury, or personal misconduct, not for the substance of their rulings. The 2025 resolutions have zero realistic chance of the two-thirds Senate vote needed to convict, which is itself a sign the guardrail is holding even under real political pressure.
Sweeping single-judge injunctions against elected-branch policy raise a real separation-of-powers concern worth taking seriously. Federal judges issuing sweeping nationwide injunctions against a duly elected administration's core policies are exercising a scope of power the Constitution's framers didn't clearly contemplate for individual district judges. Raising impeachment as a possible check, however unlikely to succeed, is a legitimate expression of the separation-of-powers concern that unelected judges are overriding elected branches.
The judiciary hasn't gotten a real staffing update since 1990, even as caseloads grew with the population. The federal judiciary hasn't seen a comprehensive new-judgeship bill become law since 1990, even as the U.S. population has grown roughly 30% and district-court filings have risen by a comparable share. A bipartisan version of this bill was vetoed once already when timing math favored the other party.
Designing the bill so judgeships go to "the next unknown president" was a real attempt to depoliticize the process — one still being tested. The JUDGES Act traces back to a genuinely bipartisan 2024 deal, negotiated specifically so the new judgeships would be allocated to "the next unknown president" regardless of party. That structure has nonetheless been criticized from both directions once an actual winner was known.
This isn't a partisan ask — the judiciary's own institutional voice has been requesting it for over a decade. The Judicial Conference — the judiciary's own nonpartisan policymaking body — has recommended new judgeships in nearly every biennial report for over a decade. The version advanced in 2025 was ordered reported by the House Judiciary Committee with support that included Democratic votes.
A self-enforced ethics code with no independent enforcement mechanism isn't much of a code at all. The Supreme Court's 2023 code of conduct remains entirely self-enforced, with no independent body empowered to investigate a complaint or impose a consequence. Even Justices Kagan and Jackson have publicly said the Court needs an enforcement mechanism it currently lacks.
Term limits draw unusually broad, durable bipartisan support, even where the enforcement questions remain contested. Public support for term limits specifically has been unusually broad and durable across party lines — a 2022 AP-NORC poll found two-thirds of Americans in favor, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. The two parties disagree sharply on the code-of-conduct enforcement question and whether any of this should apply to sitting justices.
Who gets to discipline a sitting Justice without compromising judicial independence is a real, unanswered constitutional question. An enforceable ethics code raises a genuine separation-of-powers question neither side has fully resolved: who outside the judiciary would have the constitutional authority to investigate or discipline a sitting Justice. Proposals to date haven't answered that question any more concretely than the Court's own 2023 code did.
The blue slip is one of the few checks a Senate minority still has over district court appointments, and it's under direct pressure. The blue-slip tradition — letting a nominee's two home-state senators effectively veto district court picks — has been honored by Judiciary Committee chairs of both parties for decades specifically to prevent a president packing courts without local buy-in. Abandoning it now would remove one of the few remaining checks a minority party has left over district court appointments.
Holding this line under direct pressure from his own party's president is a genuinely bipartisan-consistent choice. Even as the President has publicly and repeatedly pressured his own party's Judiciary Committee chairman to eliminate the blue slip entirely, Chairman Grassley has kept the district-court tradition in place — the same choice made by the Democratic chairman who preceded him. He's continuing to advance the President's circuit court nominees under the different rule that has applied there since 2017.
An unwritten custom is functionally overriding the President's constitutional appointment authority. A sitting president's constitutional authority to appoint federal judges and U.S. attorneys shouldn't functionally depend on which party holds a state's Senate seats. Treating an unwritten Senate custom as an effective veto arguably frustrates the President's Article II appointment power more than the Constitution's advice-and-consent process requires.
The Court's size has never been fixed by the Constitution, and it has changed seven times before. Nine justices was itself a political choice tied to the number of federal circuits in 1869, not a constitutional requirement, and the size of the Court has changed seven times in its history. Expanding it to 13 justices, one per current circuit, would restore that original logic while ending what proponents describe as an illegitimate supermajority built through norm-breaking confirmation fights.
Every past expansion happened when one party controlled both branches and used the moment to its own advantage — a pattern this proposal would likely repeat. Every past change to the Court's size happened when one party controlled both Congress and the presidency and used that power to reshape the Court's composition for its own advantage. That's precisely the historical pattern critics on both sides warn a new expansion would repeat rather than resolve, regardless of which party did it next.
Expanding the Court specifically to change its ideological balance is court-packing, whatever else you call it. Court expansion proposed explicitly and repeatedly for the stated purpose of changing the ideological balance of a Court whose current composition the proposing party dislikes is court-packing by definition, not structural reform. That's the same logic FDR's 1937 plan used, which even a Democratic-controlled Congress rejected at the time.